Who's dumber: Congress or Martin Luther King Jr.? The dumb report on Congressional dumbness

— -- Are conservatives stupider than liberals?

That's one way to read the lively parlor-game data released this week by the Sunlight Foundation, a 6-year-old educational concern that attempts to make government more transparent. Sunlight's report—which assigned grade levels to how members of Congress talk—revealed that the most right-wing of our representatives express themselves, on average, at the lowest grade level in Congress.

“No abortion,” you can imagine these simple-minded conservatives saying. “It is bad.”

According to the report, Democrats have a more sophisticated way of expressing themselves. Democrats evidently use multi-syllabic words—like “moreover”—and more complex sentence structure than their colleagues on the right. Replete with internal clauses—the ones that can throw off listeners and muddy a point—the rococo stylings of Democrats evidently go hand-in-hand with the promotion of their pet causes, like universal health care and of course their longstanding war on antidisestablishmentarianism.

Republicans dominate the extremes of the list—both the speaker at the highest level and the one at the lowest are members of the GOP. Their average grade level is 10.4; that of Democrats is 10.8. Sunlight has also made a point to say that eloquence, or verbal complexity, anyway, is on the wane among lawmakers. Congress as a whole now apparently speaks like high school sophomores, one grade level lower than it did in 2005.